review: A Doll's House, at the Marquette Theatre, presented by crescent city stage

A Doll's House at The Marquette Theatre (photo: Crescent City Stage )

​Domestic Abyss: A Doll's House at the Marquette Theatre
Review by David S. Lewis

It is more than passingly uncomfortable that a play written about gender dynamics in 1879 feels perfectly relevant today. 

Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, credited with many of the most important dramatic works such as Peer Gynt and Enemy of the People, was accused of feminist propagandism for A Doll’s House, in which Nora, a married woman realizes that her value to all of the men in her life is based exclusively on her conformity to reductive societal ideals - especially her relationship with her paternalistic husband, Torvault. 

While the original is in three acts, Amy Herzog’s Tony-winning revival (a rarity for a translation) condenses the work to around 90 minutes, which somewhat impedes the repetitive rhythm of the original,  in which deliberate redundancy serves to reinforce the boundaries of the Nora’s world. Herzog also updates the language, transforming quaint idiom like “wretched” into something more contemporarily acidic. 

Herzog’s version forces us to deal with the familiarity of the characters’ interactions; most of us have seen these play out in the relationships of people we know intimately, and the effect is shocking.

In Crescent City Stage’s presentation, director Jana Mestecky, with two decades in the New York theater scene, shows us the play from the eyes of the couple’s children, encouraging us to see ancient dynamics from a symbolically innocent perspective.

In casting Elizabeth Newcomer and Michael A. Newcomer as Nora and Torvald, a couple married in real life portray the dysfunction of the married characters vividly: the chemistry is real and familiar, which permits the pain and outrage felt by the characters to come through incisively.  

The play here feels loaded and modern, and what vestiges of the work’s Old World origins remain imbue the minimalist production with a surreality the serves to heighten the tension. Secondary characters in this are also wonderfully cast: Douglas Scott Streater’s Dr. Rank, a family friend with several important secrets, is genial and warm, and so his revelations land like a blade. 

Sue Jin Song’s Kristine, whose attempts to rebuild her own life upend Nora’s, gives an earnest that makes her character feel complete. And Doug Spearman provides his Krogstad, a brooding and embittered former loan shark trying to turn a new page, with a dignity and affection well-reserved for this false antagonist, seemingly a threat to Nora’s bourgeoise idyll but ultimately the key to unlocking her life’s prison.

Hurricane Francine affected this play's schedule, so please consider supporting them on September 22 @ 2:30p.m. Click here for information and ticketing.  
You can follow David S. Lewis: @allaboardnola
​

Subscribe to our FREE weekly newsletter